Rights over Air Space

From a post by Feniks Stone:




Her post got me thinking.

I think having this type of control, while making free air flight and grid-wide satellite networks impossible, would foster the development of more clear cut zones and transit spaces. In other words, I think roads would actually mean something for a change.

Clearly those who love flying, will dislike this idea intensely. As someone who doesn't do much flying, and frankly finds flying in SL tedious and annoying, I'd prefer the return of point-to-point teleporting for my travel needs.

Maybe having established travel ways for vehicle traffic would benefit the vehicle-industry. These corridors would create more vehicle traffic. People would see more vehicles flying/driving in a setting that makes sense. Having a familar context for vehicles may increase the demand for them.

Or not

My point in starting the thread was to get a discussion going. Hopefully a reasonable one..and not a flame filled "OMG...YOU WANT TO NERF PLANES!"

Clearly LL has some specific ideas about land usage, land owner rights, and the way air space is to be used. Just as clearly this runs contrary to the views of many residents.

Oh, and another thought, what if there were some sims sold with airspace rights? Would you pay more to have rights over the land and airspace? I'm pretty sure I would.

Another tawdry vixen obliquely posts:

My immediate feeling is that I've come to really enjoy aerial travel by way of several vehicles, including Rickard Roentgen's RA-3 Hammerhead, and Cubey Terra's Tigershark and the v3 of his hot air balloon. In the latter one in particular, sometimes I just enjoy puffing around without any determined destination, but with the journey being the reward in its truest sense and setting coordinates for a sim far, far away. It's relaxing and therapeutic to me and it may not the most practical way to get around, but that's not the point: for me, it calms me intensely.

Now, I don't wanna cause trouble, and if someone doesn't want me flying over their house, it'd be nice if I could be nudged gently off-course instead of thrown out of my balloon. This way, I respect their rights and at the same time, I'm not jolted unpleasantly. It'd be funny to see air traffic lanes like some advanced sci-fi film where we FINALLY have flying cars.

But eh, one of the reasons why I like voyages through the air is that I can see all the beauty in SL from the proverbial bird's-eye view and really be swept away and appreciate it from a bigger picture.

Freeform flying and the thrill of skydiving are very valid and enjoyable parts of my explorations.

Indeed. Leave the airspace alone. You say you want real discussion, but your idea does indeed boil down to nerfing planes.

Instead, make it so that land owners can disallow objects that are not occupied by an AV from entering their land. That way the concerns over data-collecting satalites and such can be addressed without nerfing an activity that many people in SL enjoy.

And give us point-to-point teleporting for folks that prefer that route.

-Ghoti

Ps. OMG...YOU WANT TO NERF PLANES!

Ok, Tawdry

I get that some people enjoy flying around, but I'm not actually calling for the prevention of that. You could still fly, just in designated travelways that would be guaranteed safe..If you wander off the beaten trail, well then its like it is now...there is a chance that your way will be barred or that you will run into a wall that has not rezzed.

Basically now, there's a chance that your flight will be interrupted with someone attempting to use the space above their land in such a way that is flyby-unfriendly. When I want to go somewhere in SL, I just want to get there. For me teleporting is the magical breakthru awesome techno-miracle of SL. But sadly my desire to travel easily and in a way that fulfilled my dreams was severely curtailed with the damnable telehub concept. (Damn its eyes FOREVAR! *shaking my fist at the sky*)

So be it.

I port to a telehub. See that my real destination is now 2 sims away, and begin flying. Immediately! (my strategy at this point is to flee the area BEFORE things rez) I'm not here to explore the densely packed, prim-intensive, texture-o-rama cornucopia that is the immediate area around many telehubs. I'm there to get to the location 2 sims away. So the sooner I'm on my way, the faster I can begin the tedium of flying up high to the cloud layer then moving toward my dot, hoping desperately I dont fly into some partially rezzed house or trigger someone's paranoid security script. Whee! Why do I have to work so hard just to get from point a to point b?

I think transit spaces - like roads, flight paths, satellite paths, that everyone agrees are "public" spaces are worth considering. If such spaces are designated public, then owned land can become much more private. While in the real world, planes and satellites fly over my land, due to my limitations in the real world (I cant fly, or zoom my camera) the distance they are from my home is much greater than the 400 meter area we talk about in SL.

My access to the airspace above my land, gives me a different sense of ownership to that space than I would even dream of in RL. And sadly, my sense of privacy/ownership/autonomy is undermined when people can simply fly above a certain height and put whatever they want on my land or drop whatever they feel like on my head.

Nerf it! Nerf it right in the ear!

Absolutely a GREAT idea.

Can ya imagine how wacky things are gonna get when the non-Euclidean geometry gets out in full force? Then that supreme tawdry vixen and grammarian, Catherine Omega, will be all like "HA HA HA! TOLD YOU SO!" but without the caps and far more elegance than I could ever hope to convey.

The problem at hand isn't aircraft -- it's scanners and other objects that evade the land tools in order to use sim resources. It's bad enough that so many people like to place ejection script landmines at all altitudes over their land. Let's not make things worse by actually banning flight entirely or restricting it to a tiny corridor. Some may prefer to use SL as a glorified chat room, but others actually like to build things and have fun. Not all of us are here for hoochie hair and bling.

Wow, Cubey, did I really earn such a scathing dismissal? I will re-read my posts and see where I went wrong.

My apologies. I didn't mean "you" in the singular but plural -- I wasn't addressing you in particular, Bel. I'll edit my post accordingly.

Well, I don't think we're all in here for flying advertisements as well.

Think, tragedy of the commons before you do those sorts of things.

I would rather blast across the grid on afterburners than teleport. I do teleport occasionally, but for me, it kills the continuity of the experience of being in a virtual world. I will say this. I know that people want to not be bothered in their 700M sex boxes in the sky, and I appreciate that. However, they should not be able to separate me from my aircraft and send me home without warning. LL has punished people for shooting others on their own (safe) land. Why would that be intolerable, but not planejacking them and sending them home, possibly necessitating a relog in the process? These security scripts are no better than griefing tools, in my opinion. They are an unnecessary disruption to people who are just trying to pass through. I really think security scripts should have the same power as land access controls, albeit at any altitude: If you ban someone, they get notified that they have 15 seconds to leave, and then they get ejected. Teleporting a person home is extremely rude and should be restricted to unsafe land and Linden employees.

^ there was a time after seeing Huns's video of his aircraft technology that I envisioned him and a group of his clones flying in formation through the skies of Second Life, making underlookers gape and remark as they zipped by. The Hunses (?) would SOOO be SL's Blue Angels.

My original idea really doesn’t nerf flying. As a matter of fact I probs would not ban it over my land. What I was thinking tho, is we really should have the right to do so if we wish.

The idea controls flying, or rather allows an expansion of it while upholding land-owners rights (imho). Of course there will be objections. Remember when you could freely copy a texture? (the fetid will). As the world progresses so do the checks and balances. Flying is part of this. I think an organized transportation system will rock. I bet eventually it will be a standard. It will be needed. It will provide jobs. It will not nerf flying. It will take it to the next level. Flight paths, air ports, jobs. I imagine the flight path areas being an option to highlight in a color as owned or group land.

I was chatting with a neighbor today, he has a device that will transport you anywhere within 20 sims in the same time it would take to transport you in one. His device could end the long flights from the telehub to the event spots. His device doesn’t suffer from the lag experienced when teleporting.

His device could turn Linden Telehubs into archaic leftovers remembered by the second generation of the fetid core.

A regulated system of air traffic could do this too.

More and more of the infrastructure of the world will be taken from LL and created by the user base as the world grows. An implementation of a structured air space could be very rewarding to the community as a whole.

fen-

Cubey, I have tremendous respect for you. So I'm sincerely sorry if my post seemed like an attack on the flight industry which you have done so much to promote and improve.

I'll try to express it better. Right now we have somewhat free flight. In theory you can go anywhere, but in practice people have builds and scripts that prevent this in some instances.

What I'm proposing, in addition to this quasi-free flight zone, is an guaranteed unrestricted thoroughfare that is dedicated to creating transit spaces. This is not instead of..this is in addition to.

Think of the situation of ground vehicles. Sometimes they can drive around a sim..sometimes builds make it impossible. Some people even bar ground traffic completely using land ban tools. But for the most part, despite having easy access to these tools, by and large the majority of residents give free access to their land, even if their builds are not very land vehicle friendly.

I think if people had control of the airspace as well, the majority of residents would keep it open. Some wouldn't, of course. So i think flight in all areas would remain similar to what it is today....mostly fine but with the chance of hitting a wall or an aggresive script. But in addition to this, we would also have guaranteed throughways that would allow Huns to zip around at full speed without danger of hitting an unexpected skybox.

Plus ground vehicles would now have guaranteed access too

I really dont feel like I'm talking about nerfing, so much as I'm looking at airspace differently. We can either privilege that space so that air vehicles always have an advantage over ground vehicles..or we can make a space for both air and land vehicles.

Perhaps the difference of opinions come from the assumption that if people can lock down their airspace, everyone will. I see that a few people use their ability to ban everyone from their land, but the overwhelming majority leave their land open. I can't help but think the same would happen with airspace control.

Anyway, despite all appearances to the contrary, I dont want to prevent people from enjoying vehicles in SL.

I would like to explore different ways we might organize space with in SL. I'd like to look at the ways we can maintain public space for community use while still creating even better control over personal space. But I can concede this may be neither the time or appropriate topic for that discussion.

I own land in RL but I can't control the airspace (way) over my head. I'm all for controlling non-avatar-controlled/attached objects, and potentially even for raising the airspace limits (the height you can control), but if LL ever fixes the sim-crossing issue, then flying around this world would be a true joy.

I would hate to see that experience destroyed because one is inevitably bouncing off of red-line walls at 400 meters high. Where my avatar can fly, i imagine i should be able to pilot a little cubey-plane too.

Check out my new suggestion in the features forum:
/13/2a/39038/1.html

Let's have seperate airspace sims entirely above a certain height (2-3km+)

Watch this space [ ] (or a similar one nearby) for an announcement by the Amazon Nation shortly...

I kinda skimmed over this so if I am repeating something or covering an issue someone has already addressed then forgive me.

What happens to the person that owns a small business that is surrounded by land another person owns if that other person and forbids travel over the airspace??? Business is shut down. You cant have roads going to every plot so what do you do? Therefore, unless you can directly TP to any landmark, this idea of total control over the entire airspace by landowners will not fly (pun).

I still don't see the connection between remote, moving scanners and aircraft. Why would anyone want to restrict aircraft movement to one or two corridors? How does that address the problem?

Also, if we turn the skies into a patchwork of invisible no-fly zones, how does a pilot avoid them? It adds to the problem posed by ejection scripts and doesn't address the problem of scanners, which would inevitably find a way around the no-fly zones.

Seriously, there's no connection between vehicles and scanners. These ideas would basically destroy a lot of people's fun, and would remove the reason why I stayed in SL for over a year.

Has anyone suggested an option to "View Hazards" as a means of helping people avoid the security scripts? It would be like the View Alpha option, except you would be able to see if you are about to fly into the range of an active sensor. The color of the zone could be green if it's an innocuous sensor, but if the sensor is associated with the more deadly functions it would show up as red.

Where are these transit spaces / unrestricted thoroughfares going to come from?

The infrastructure was not in place as the world grew, and so now I'd like to know how you'd propose it be implemented without displacing a *lot* of people?

We need more tools and abilities, not busting up the ones we already have.

Whatever your imagination is conjuring up about a romantic vision of airports and busy airways, I expect the reality will be far more mediocre and uninteresting. In the end, it will just result in a world with less freedom to move about, as people will be even more self-righteous about their "property rights".

And you can bet return-home scanners will be even more common then becuase the land owners can justify that nobody needs to fly over their land anymore since there are transit spaces now.

I am a little confused by this thread myself. I am thinking that your goal Bel is to promote the aircraft industry AND prevent the use of flying land scanners? Are scanners even worth discussing since this new page went up for public land, Cubey? I suppose they will just figure something else out to scan, but it certainly seems like it will be a less likely occurrance.

Your idea Bel is a very interesting one to me. It would bring some community to traveling, and of course create SL jobs. It would take a rather herculean effort to make it work however. If there were to be airports that lasted longer than one week, they would probably have to be created by Cubey & the gang or the Lindens. You wouldn't want to be following this new plan and suddenly there is no airport to land at because blah blah McAirport decided to sell his land. Additionally with the lag of numerous avatars and scripts in a sim, and sim crossings themselves, it would be next to impossible to stay in the "flight path" for longer than 3 sims. God forbid there are others in the flight path (though air collisions would be cool, don't think I have seen one of those =D)!

When you own a parcel of land, you own that section of the region all the way to the highest point possible. Many people choose to protect their airspace with devices and security scripts already. I do hate this method, but is a new method really necessary? I would think if anything, some type of visual warning for pilots would be nice. Frankly, the easiest way to solve that as well as your issue would be to raise the "ban bars" all the way to what is considered the top of the grid. However, talk about a riddled flight path making it impossible to navigate SL!

Then there is the most important point of all, being able to fly freely around the world is one of my favorite pass times =D I don't "play" that much because I like to build and script, etc. I very much enjoy flying from one place to another. Forcing me to follow a flight path that goes contrary to where I want does 2 things... number 1 it would likely take longer to travel because I must navigate a straight line when I need to go on the diagonal... number 2 I would likely only be able to reach "the closest point on the flight path" which will probably force me to avie fly 4 or 500 sm to where I actually want. After a month of that, I would be surprised if I continued to use aircraft at all.

I don't think anyone is truly suggesting you want to nerf planes, but your plan as far as I can tell will inevitably do so Additionally, until SL moves to at least Havoc 2, this plan would be a server & client nightmare for anyone in the "flight path".

I LOVE your idea Ananda I'll second the motion! Make it a debug tool or something =D

I agree with you, invoking "vehicles" in support of a replicating worm is spurious.

I don't want to outlaw unmanned traveling things, however.

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Replicating widely is the problem. (Who can tell that something is "scanning"?)